The weird Iowa laws that actually exist are mostly about margarine. Iowa Code Chapter 191 still dictates how margarine is packaged, labeled, advertised, and even shaped when served in restaurants, and a few cities carry their own leftover oddities, including a Cedar Rapids ordinance that banned fortune-telling for more than eighty years. Most of the stranger claims you’ll see on viral lists, though, don’t trace back to any real statute.
Margarine Has Its Own Chapter of the Code
Iowa Code Section 191.2 requires that any colored margarine sold at retail be packaged in units of one pound or less, with the word “oleomargarine” or “margarine” printed on the label in type at least as large as any other lettering on the package. Every individual portion inside has to carry its own wrapper with the same labeling, in type no smaller than twenty-point font.1Iowa Legislature. Iowa Code 191.2 – Dairy Products and Imitations The rules came out of a period when butter was an economic lifeline for the state and the dairy lobby had the political muscle to make imitation products jump through hoops.
The restaurant rule is the one that gets quoted most. Under Iowa Code Section 191.3, any public eating place that serves margarine must either post a conspicuous sign saying so, print the fact on the menu, label each individual serving, or serve each portion in a triangular shape. Triangular pats of margarine are a compliance option written directly into state law.2Iowa Legislature. Iowa Code 191.3 – Sale of Imitation Products, Notice to Public, Penalties The reasoning was that a distinctive shape would stop restaurants from quietly swapping cheap margarine in for butter without telling anyone.
Section 191.5 goes further and bans advertising margarine as a dairy product through any means at all, including printed material, signage, symbols, sounds, or any combination of them. The language is broad enough to reach essentially any marketing that might make a consumer confuse margarine for butter.3Justia Law. Iowa Code Section 191.5 – Advertising Oleomargarine
The penalties aren’t trivial. Violating any of these provisions is a simple misdemeanor, and a restaurant owner convicted under Section 191.3 faces a one-year suspension of all state-issued licenses for that establishment.2Iowa Legislature. Iowa Code 191.3 – Sale of Imitation Products, Notice to Public, Penalties A liquor license pulled for a year over the geometry of a butter substitute sounds like a joke, but that is what the statute says.
Cedar Rapids Banned Fortune-Telling for Over Eighty Years
Cedar Rapids had an ordinance on its books for more than eight decades making it illegal to practice clairvoyance within city limits. The ban treated fortune-telling as inherently fraudulent, reflecting an early-twentieth-century view that palmists and psychics were con artists preying on gullible residents. In 2003, the city council began repealing it, approving the first of three required readings of a repeal ordinance. Critics pointed out that the original law could infringe on religious freedom, since many spiritual traditions include forms of divination.
Cedar Rapids wasn’t alone in this. Similar municipal bans existed across the country, and courts have been increasingly willing to strike them down on First Amendment grounds. Any Iowa city still enforcing one today would be inviting a constitutional challenge.
Throwing Stones in Cedar Rapids Requires a Written Permit
Another Cedar Rapids rule frequently cited on weird-law lists reportedly prohibits anyone from throwing bricks, stones, or similar objects onto any street or public ground without written permission from the City Council. It’s commonly referenced as Municipal Code Section 64.02, though the exact text is hard to verify because the city has reorganized its code several times over the past century. In historical context the rule made sense: brick-paved streets were expensive to maintain, horse-drawn carriages could be damaged by stray debris, and construction sites weren’t regulated the way they are now.
A violation charged today would likely fall under Iowa’s simple misdemeanor classification. Under Iowa Code Section 903.1, a simple misdemeanor carries a fine between $105 and $855, with the court authorized to impose up to thirty days in jail instead of or on top of the fine. Required surcharges get added separately and don’t count toward the $855 cap.4Iowa Legislature. Iowa Code 903.1 – Maximum Sentence for Misdemeanants In practice, this kind of conduct now gets handled under disorderly conduct or public nuisance statutes, but the old ordinance technically still gives the city another option.
The Ones That Aren’t Real
Plenty of lists claim Iowa has laws requiring one-armed piano players to perform for free, making it illegal for horses to eat fire hydrants in Marshalltown, or prohibiting men in Ottumwa from winking at women they don’t know. These claims are almost certainly myths. No Iowa statute or verified municipal ordinance matches any of them, and the sites that repeat them never cite an actual code section. The one-armed piano player story is the most persistent example: it shows up on dozens of weird-laws websites, but nobody has ever located the supposed statute in the Iowa Code or any municipal code.
These myths follow a predictable pattern. They tend to start as misreadings of real but complicated legislation, oversimplifications of old regulatory language, or outright inventions that get repeated until they feel true. A licensing rule for psychiatric facilities becomes “you need a license to keep a lunatic.” A tax disclosure provision becomes a joke about declaring illegal income. The same thing likely explains most of Iowa’s supposed oddball ordinances.
The test is simple. If no one can point you to an actual code section, treat the claim with heavy skepticism. The margarine chapter is real. The Cedar Rapids fortune-telling ban was real. The horses and the winking are not.
Why These Laws Are Still on the Books
Repealing a law takes the same legislative effort as passing one. A bill has to be introduced, debated in committee, voted through both chambers, and signed. For local ordinances it means multiple council readings. When a statute is harmless and nobody is being prosecuted under it, legislators have no particular reason to spend that time. The margarine labeling rules in Chapter 191 affect almost nobody, generate no controversy, and would eat real floor time to repeal, so they stay.
The legal doctrine of desuetude is supposed to address exactly this situation. The idea is that if a law goes unenforced for long enough, courts should stop allowing prosecutions under it. American courts have occasionally entertained the argument, but the doctrine has never gained reliable traction. Most judges treat it as interesting rather than winning.
A more promising defense against prosecution under an archaic ordinance would be selective enforcement under the Equal Protection Clause. That argument requires showing two things: that other people in similar situations weren’t charged, and that the decision to charge you was motivated by something improper like race, religion, or retaliation for exercising a constitutional right. Courts set the bar high, and they presume prosecutors act in good faith. Even so, a charge brought under a law that hasn’t been enforced in living memory would look suspicious enough to give a defense attorney real material to work with.
Iowa’s archaic statutes are less about absurdity than about inertia. The triangular margarine rule and the fortune-telling ban weren’t silly when they were written. They reflected genuine economic anxieties and moral convictions of the communities at the time. They linger because legislatures are reactive. They fix what’s broken and leave the rest alone.